Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

by Paul Theroux

Sunny, warm, pleasant, spring-like in January, on the back roads of the Lowcountry. But my pleasure was tempered by the shacks and the rusted trailers surrounded by plastic children’s toys and old bikes and the absence of any industry. The poor in the rural South cast aside and existing like residue.

The unlettered person has other refined skills and is often more watchful, shrewd, and freer in discussion than the literate person with a limited experience of literature, who believes that all the answers to life’s questions can be found in the pages of the Bible, say, or the Koran. And then there are the laziest and most presumptuous of people, those who can read but who don’t bother, who live in the smuggest ignorance and seem to me dangerous.

“Why was it, in moments just before I leave the South, did I always feel some easing of a great burden? It was as if someone had taken some terrible weight off my shoulders, or as if some old grievance had suddenly fallen away.” “You go north. You became expatriated, exiled,” says a character in Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, “yearning to repudiate the wrong you’ve grown up with.”